Re: wadegile and pinyin LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORMs

["Randy Presuhn" <[e-mail]>]

Hi -

Following up after reading
http://www.un.org/depts/dhl/maplib/ungegn/session-8/working-papers/working-paper10.pdf
...

> > From: "Andrew Cunningham" <[e-mail]>
> > To: "Randy Presuhn" <[e-mail]>
> > Cc: <[e-mail]>
> > Sent: Monday, August 25, 2008 11:37 PM
> > Subject: Re: wadegile and pinyin LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORMs
> >
> > playing devil's advocate:
> > 
> > If zh-pinyin is Mandarin in Hanyu Pinyin, can the pinyin variant be used
> > with other languages, since Mongol, Uyghur, and Tibetan, etc can be
> > officially transcribed in Pinyin in PRC?

We see in that article that for Uyghur, which has alread adopted the Roman script,
"transliteration is based on its own written form."  So clearly for Uyghur
it's not "Pinyin" at all, but rather Uyghur's own romanized form.  We also
that rather than respecting dialectal variation for Tibetan and Mongolian,
(and this article is restricted to place names in an atlas, rather than
general-purpose usage) they chose specific pronunciations, so these would
seem to be a special-purpose variants as well.  The article doesn't address
at all the question of phonemes not included in the pinyin repertoire.

All this reinforces my belief that these variants are quite distinct from
Hanyu Pinyin as a variant or orthography, and should in no way be
lumped together with it.

Randy